


A World Where the Flowers Bloom

by truthwatcher



Series: Where the Flowers Bloom [3]
Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson, SANDERSON Brandon - Works
Genre: F/M, Oh look, more self-indulgent au fic, my hand must have slipped, shrug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 15:38:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17004405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truthwatcher/pseuds/truthwatcher
Summary: On the night the world ended and began anew, Vin looked up at the stars.//Or, Vin and Elend find a few quiet moments between ending an old world and beginning a new one.





	A World Where the Flowers Bloom

On the night the world ended and began anew, Vin looked up at the stars. 

“It’s so strange,” she whispered, sitting with knees drawn to her chest in the field she had woken up in. She touched the grass, the flowers, her brain not quite comprehending both the wrongness and the rightness of this new world she had found herself in. 

She felt a hand on her arm — Elend, who was laying down on his back next to her. 

He had been by her side ever since they had woken in each other’s arms, to this new world. She didn’t want him out of her sight. She had seen him die, had seen him stabbed and beheaded and—

And she didn’t want to live in a world where there was no Elend. 

She leaned down, wrapping her arms around him, laying her head on his chest so she could feel his heartbeat as she squeezed her eyes shut. 

It was dark now. The sun — the yellow sun, with its golden light — had set an hour ago, and people had retreated back into the caverns for the night as a chill came into the air.

Vin had come here, to the spot in the middle of the field where they had woken up. Elend had followed her wordlessly. She knew Sazed and Tindwyl were somewhere nearby, too — she could hear them talking when she burned tin. 

Sazed, who had saved them all. 

Ham was down with his family, but Breeze and Allrianne were moving between caverns at Spook’s command. The boy had... grown, since Vin had seen him last. Leadership suited him — and right now, leadership was a burden she would gladly let him shoulder, if it meant she could have this time alone with Elend. 

“I saw you die,” she said now. 

“I know,” he said quietly. “I saw you die, too. I felt you, at the end. Fuelling my allomancy. And then... then Marsh killed me. I — we saw Kelsier, didn’t we?”

She nodded. Oh, Kelsier. She was hit by the grief of his loss all at once, after having this one final goodbye with him. And yet, something told her this wasn’t the last she’d see of him. He was, after all, a survivor. 

“Then, we woke up. Here. Alive.”

“Yes,” she said. “I— I don’t understand what happened.”

“Saze will explain when he’s ready,” Elend said. “He seems pretty shaken.”

She leaned up onto her elbows so she could look at him, caressing his face. 

“I saw you die,” she said again. She knew she sounded haunted, but... but she couldn’t help herself. Her lip trembled, her breathing becoming faster. 

He sat up, pulling her into his lap and wrapping his arms around her. Lips pressed against her forehead. 

“I know,” he said softly, gently rocking her as she began to cry.

Cried, for the world they had lost even as they had saved it. For the city of Luthadel, now gone. For a lifetime of experiences, taken. For the few moments where she had thought her love taken forever. For the mentor she had lost, and the lives she had taken, and all the people she had loved who had gone. 

At long last, she cried.

 

She woke up in Elend’s arms. Those arms, strong and scarred, that had held her all through the night, reassuring her. 

They had been given a private alcove, curtained off, by Spook. It would serve as a room until they could sort things out a little more. They slept on the ground, with two blankets serving as the mattress and another to keep them warm. 

She didn’t care. As long as she woke up in Elend’s arms, and he was alive and healthy and happy beside her, she didn’t care where she had to sleep. 

Vin knew that the experience of losing Elend had shaken her. At the Well, so long ago, seeing him on the brink of death had given her new perspective. Seeing him come back as a Mistborn had given her peace. But seeing him die before her, so violently — she couldn’t move past the horror of that moment, even as she tried to avoid the memory. 

His chest moved steadily as he breathed, and the motion reassured her — he was alive, he was alive, _he was alive_.

 

Elend woke to find Vin watching him. Her dark eyes studied him in the dim lighting — there was no sunlight down here, and so the caverns were lit sparsely with lanterns. 

“Good morning,” he said quietly, twirling a lock of her hair around his finger before leaning up to kiss her cheek. 

She laid her head on his chest, and for a while they simply lay there. Elend stroked her hair absently. He knew that she had been completely shaken by the events of the day before. It was like after she had attacked Cett’s army during the Siege of Luthadel, only worse. When they had woken up in that field — the look in her eyes made him shudder. He had seen the hollowness in her gaze, and it terrified him that she was going through something that he didn’t know how to help her through. 

He didn’t even understand what she had undergone, holding the power of gods, the power to fuel another’s allomancy. To hold the vastness of eternity within you, and then shrink back to mortality only to find the entire world upended. Not to mention the strange, in-between place of mist they had found themselves in. 

His thoughts were interrupted by her shifting to look at him. 

“You’re everything to me, Elend,” she said quietly, her eyes intense. “You’re— You’re my everything.”

“Vin,” he said began, but she was shaking her head. 

“You’re my everything,” she said, “and watching you die is haunting me. I don’t know what I would do in a world that didn’t have you, Elend. I don’t know how I would live. And it scares me, because— because it could still happen. There are always going to be threats to both of us. And I don’t ever want to lose you.”

“I don’t want to lose you, either,” he said.

She blinked, and a single tear slid down her face. She wasn’t crying, exactly. But she wasn’t not crying, either. 

“Vin,” Elend said softly. “Vin, I’m here. I’m right here with you.”

She inhaled deeply. “I know.”

“I’m alive.”

“I know,” she said. She held him tighter.

He stroked her hair back from her face, wiping the tear from her cheek with his thumb. 

She let out a ragged breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m— I know I’m not the only one that’s upset, I know you are too.”

“You have nothing to apologise for, Vin,” he said. “Alright?”

She smiled weakly. “No, I do. Tell me. What are you feeling? You haven’t told me anything.”

He sighed. “I don’t know where to begin.”

Vin fixed him with a look. “Last night, I cried and you held me.”

“I’m your husband,” he said with a smile. “It’s in the job description.”

“And I’m your wife,” she said, more softly, leaning closer to him. “I’m here for you, too. You don’t need to hide what you’re feeling because you think you need to be strong for me, Elend.”

He returned her smile, and there was knowing in the expression. “You understand me even when I don’t understand myself.”

She lay down beside him again, turned on her side to face him. He did the same, so he could look at her. 

Idly, she reached out a hand to play with his hair, and he set one of his own hands on her waist as she watched him, expectant. 

“It hurt,” he said. “Dying, I mean. I felt that axe, felt the pain of it as it was buried in me. I felt terror — for myself, for you, and for the world. I saw my death coming towards me, and I was terrified.”

Her grip tightened slightly, but she only watched him, waiting for him to go on. 

“If you died,” he continued, meeting her gaze. “I don’t know how I would carry on. When you were being held prisoner by Yomen, it ate at me from the inside. If you died— I don’t want to think about it, Vin. So after I died, and then reached that strange place, and you came there too — I didn’t know what to think. And we didn’t even have the time to process what all of that meant, because we came back somehow. And that’s breaking my mind.”

“Trust you to think of the logistics of coming back from the dead,” she said with a small smile. 

“Somebody has to,” he said with a shrug. “But, well. The truth is I really don’t know how to feel about the things that have happened, and how to process them. I think— I think I need time to understand everything that happened. I mean, you Ascended. What does that even mean? How did that happen? I need to know. To understand.”

“I think we both need some time to think about all of that,” she admitted. “Seeing Kelsier has me rattled, too.”

He nodded his agreement. 

Outside their little alcove, he could hear people starting to get up and move about. But inside, he and Vin were silent, watching each other. His thumb traced patterns on her hip bone; her fingers played with his hair. 

Elend treasured these moments of peace, knowing that the coming of day would bring a new host of enormous problems they needed to fix. Apparently, once you saved the world you needed to fix up the new world, too. 

“You should go,” she said quietly at last, reluctance in her voice. “The people need their emperor.”

“The emperor needs his empress,” he said, his voice equally soft. “I don’t know how I can help people, when I don’t even _know_ what world we’ve all woken up in. Where are we, Vin?”

“A new world,” she said. “A world where the flowers bloom.”


End file.
